Birthday:
3 January 1975, La Jolla, California, USA
Height:
5' 4" (1.63 m)
Biography
Together with her younger sister, Crystal McKellar,
she began acting at a young age in her mother's dance studio. In 1982
the family moved to Los Angeles and a few years later she appeared in
her first commercial. A few guest appearances in "The Twilight Zone"
(1985) was followed by her breakthrough in "The Wonder Years" (1988).
She has had good grades in math and French. In her spare time she likes
to go skiing, swimming and surfing
Danica Mae McKellar (born January 3, 1975) is an American
actress, film director, academic, book author and education advocate.
She is best known for her role as Winnie Cooper in the television show
The Wonder Years,
[1] and later as the
New York Times bestselling author
[2] of four popular
[2][3] non-fiction books:
Math Doesn't Suck,
Kiss My Math,
Hot X: Algebra Exposed and
Girls Get Curves: Geometry Takes Shape, which encourage middle-school and high-school girls to have confidence and succeed in mathematics.
[4]
Born in La Jolla, California, McKellar moved with her family to Los Angeles when she was eight. Her mother Mahalia is a homemaker; her father Christopher is a real estate developer.[5] Her family is "a big mix of Western Europe":[6] Her mother's ancestry is Portuguese (via the Azores and Madeira islands); her father's ancestry is Scottish, Irish, French, German and Dutch.[6] McKellar and her sister Crystal McKellar
(who is loosely named after their dad) both maintained professional
acting careers as children, but with a strong emphasis on education as a
priority. As a result, Crystal became a corporate lawyer (her family
nicknamed her "Legally Blonde" because of her hair color), while Danica
majored in mathematics. Danica and Crystal also have two half-brothers,
Chris Junior and Connor McKellar.
Acting career
The Wonder Years and early acting career
McKellar had a leading role in
The Wonder Years, an American television comedy-drama that ran for six seasons on ABC, from 1988 to 1993.
[1] She played Gwendolyn "Winnie" Cooper,
[1] the main love interest of Kevin Arnold (played by Fred Savage) on the show. Her first kiss was with Fred Savage in an episode of
The Wonder Years.
[7]
She later said, "My first kiss was a pretty nerve-wracking experience!
But we never kissed off screen, and pretty quickly our feelings turned
into brother/sister, and stayed that way."
[8] McKellar also had a role in the film
Sidekicks, directed by Aaron Norris.
Later career
McKellar has admitted the transition from "child actor to adult actor was a little bumpy."
[8] Since leaving
The Wonder Years, McKellar has had several guest roles in television series (including one with former co-star Fred Savage on
Working), and has written and directed two short films. She played Kristin Guthrie in a 1994 Lifetime TV movie,
Moment of Truth: Cradle of Conspiracy. In 1996, she played the character Annie Mills Carman in the Lifetime Moment of Truth movie
Justice For Annie.
[9] She briefly returned to regular television with a recurring role in the 2002–03 season of
The West Wing, portraying Elsie Snuffin, the stepsister and assistant of Deputy White House Communications Director Will Bailey.
[10]
McKellar appeared in lingerie in the July 2005 edition of
Stuff magazine
[11]
after readers voted her the 1990s star they would most like to see in
lingerie. McKellar explained that she agreed to the shoot in part to
obtain "grittier roles".
[8]
In June 2006, Lifetime Television announced that McKellar would star in a Lifetime movie and web-based series titled
Inspector Mom about a mother who solves mysteries.
[12] In an interview in the November 17, 2006 issue of
TV Guide, McKellar said that two TV movies and ten webisodes of
Inspector Mom were being produced.
[13]
On the August 1, 2007, edition of the
Don and Mike Show, a WJFK-FM radio program out of Washington, D.C., McKellar announced plans that the producers of
How I Met Your Mother were planning to bring her back for a recurring role (she guest-starred on the show in late 2005 in "The Pineapple Incident" and again in early 2007 in "Third Wheel"). She also made an appearance on the show
The Big Bang Theory, in the episode "The Psychic Vortex".
[14]
In 2008, she starred in
Heatstroke, a Sci-Fi Channel original movie about searching for alien life on Earth.
[15]
McKellar, as of June 23, 2008, is one of the stars commenting on the occurrences of the new millennium in VH1's
I Love the New Millennium, and as of 2009 is the math correspondent for
Brink, a program by the Science Channel about upcoming technology.
[10]
McKellar has also found work as a voice actress.
She is the voice of Miss Martian in Young Justice: Invasion. She has
also provided the voices for two characters in three video games: Jubilee in
X-Men Legends (2004), and Invisible Woman in
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance (2006) and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2 (2009).
[citation needed]
Mathematics
McKellar studied mathematics at UCLA, graduating with highest honors (summa cum laude) in 1998. As an undergraduate, she coauthored a scientific paper
[16] with Professor Lincoln Chayes and fellow student Brandy Winn. Their results are termed the 'Chayes–McKellar–Winn theorem'.
[17][18] Referring to the mathematical abilities of his student coauthors, Chayes was quoted in
The New York Times[19] as saying, "I thought that the two were really, really first-rate." McKellar's Erdős number is four.
[20] She is one of the few people with an Erdős-Bacon number, which combines an Erdős number with a Bacon Number (as in the game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon) since she also has a Bacon number of 2,
[21] making her Erdos-Bacon number a 6.
McKellar is the author of The New York Times[2] bestselling book Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle-School Math without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail,[22] that encourages girls in middle school to enjoy and succeed at mathematics.[23]
The book has been favorably reviewed by Tara C. Smith, the founder of
Iowa Citizens for Science and a professor of epidemiology at the University of Iowa.[24]
In an interview with Smith, McKellar said that she wrote the book "to
show girls that math is accessible and relevant, and even a little
glamorous" and to counteract "damaging social messages telling young
girls that math and science aren't for them".[25]
McKellar was named
Person of the Week[26] on
World News with Charles Gibson for the week ending August 10, 2007. The news segment highlighted her book
Math Doesn't Suck and her efforts to help girls develop an interest in mathematics, especially during the middle school years.
McKellar's second book, Kiss My Math: Showing Pre-Algebra Who's Boss,[27] was released on August 5, 2008. The book's target audience is girls in the 7th through 9th grades. Her third book, Hot X: Algebra Exposed![28][29][30]
was published on August 3, 2010, and is aimed at girls in the 8th-10th
grade, or even adults who want to learn algebra. Her fourth book Girls Get Curves - Geometry Takes Shape,[31] shows her readers how to feel confident, get in the driver's seat, and master the core concepts of high school geometry.
Three of McKellar's books made it to The New York Times children's bestseller list.[3][32]
Personal life
She married composer Mike Verta on March 22, 2009, in La Jolla, California; the couple had dated since 2001.[33] They had their first child on September 7, 2010, a boy they named Draco.[34][35] McKellar filed for divorce from Verta in June 2012, with the dissolution becoming final in February 2013.[36]
Filmography
USA
